PTI march leaves Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after talks in Islamabad collapse at 3 a.m.

Supporters of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan left Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on Sunday after two rounds of talks with the government failed to stop the march. Al Jazeera reported that more than 5,000 people had started. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf had first set the protest for 27 September and then moved it to 4 October so the talks could run. They did not produce an agreement.

Geo News reported that the negotiations, chaired at Parliament House by National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, collapsed at about 3 a.m. on Sunday after four drafts. PPP senator Sherry Rehman said the drafts had been closed with principals and reopened to take PTI changes, and that the break came when the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government refused to sign a text on counterterrorism cooperation with the centre that had been agreed that afternoon. PTI negotiators said their remaining demand was access to Khan, and that the government would not put that meeting in the agreement. Senate opposition leader Allama Raja Nasir Abbas said differences also remained over access to Khan's personal doctor, though the government had said meetings with his sisters and lawyers could begin.

Interior minister Mohsin Naqvi confirmed on Sunday that the talks had failed. He accused Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister Sohail Afridi of sabotaging the negotiations and said the government would not allow PTI to create a disturbance. He warned that people who broke orders would be pursued one by one, in the province or outside it. He pointed to an Islamabad High Court order of 14 September, which held that no party has a lawful right to occupy public roads, highways, interchanges, toll plazas and buildings in the capital.

The government has spent weeks putting shipping containers across the main roads into Islamabad. The march plan, as PTI described it on Sunday, is not an immediate entry into the capital. Al Jazeera said the column is due to reach Khairabad, 80 kilometres west of Islamabad, by Thursday, 8 October, and that the next step will be announced there. Afridi posted that the demonstration would go ahead. Party channels showed convoys forming in different districts of the province.

Khan has been in prison since August 2023. All but one of his convictions have been suspended or overturned on appeal, Al Jazeera reported. The party has also campaigned for the release of his three sisters, arrested in September, and has raised his eyesight: a related report cited 15 percent vision remaining in the right eye and a need for months of specialist treatment. Those health claims are the party's account. They are now tied to the demand that was left on the table at 3 a.m., a meeting the government said it was not in a position to arrange.

The political bargain that failed was narrower than the slogans on the road. Rehman's account centres on a counterterrorism text for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province PTI governs and the province the march left from. Islamabad has treated security cooperation in that province as the price of any political concession. PTI treated access to Khan as the price of calling off the march. Each side says the other moved the draft. The written record of the four drafts is not public.

What happens by Thursday is a question of distance and court orders, not of a single rally in the capital. Khairabad sits on the approach from the northwest. Containers already block the Islamabad side of that approach. The 14 September high court order gives the interior ministry a legal footing to keep roads clear inside the capital. It does not, by itself, stop a crowd from gathering short of the city line.

Naqvi said the president and the prime minister would decide the next step. PTI has not published a headcount beyond the "more than 5,000" figure carried by Al Jazeera, and it has not said whether the column will try to cross into Islamabad after Khairabad or stay outside and negotiate again. The last attempt at that negotiation ended before dawn on Sunday.